of the
theatrical profession."

From the first temporary quarters in the parlours of the Belvidere
House, then at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, the
club moved into a permanent home at No. 2 Irving Place, a building
adjoining the Academy of Music. In the autumn of 1870 the first
president, De Witt Van Buren, died, and was succeeded by A. Oakley Hall,
then the Mayor of New York, who assumed the office entirely in his
social capacity, as a journalist, dramatist, and patron of the arts. It
was he who suggested the famous "Lotos Saturday Nights." There is a
flavour of high Bohemia in the list of members of that period. Among the
artists were Beard, Reinhart, Burling, Lumley, Chapin, Bispham, and
Pickett; there were such pianists as Wehli, Mills, Hopkins, Colby, and
Bassford; singers like Randolfi, Laurence, Thomas, MacDonald, Perring,
Seguin, Matthison, and Davis; and actors like Edwin Booth, Lawrence
Barrett, Mark Smith, John Brougham, and George Clark.

Some one has said that every generation must express itself in a new
club. The decade from 1861-1870 expressed itself in several. To those
years of New York date the Columbia Yacht (1867), the Harvard, first of
the college clubs (1865), the Manhattan (1865), the New York Athletic
(1868), and the Union League (1863). The last named organization owes
its birth to the doubts and complications of the darkest hour of the War
of Secession. Unite to stand behind the President with our full
strength, was the slogan of the men who met in January, 1863, to form
the plans for the new association. At the beginning there was talk of
adopting the name "Loyal League." The first work of the club was the
organization of negro troops in New York City. Despite the opposition of
Governor Seymour, and the ridicule of the newspapers, who held up the
idea of the negro as a soldier as a huge joke, the Leaguers persisted in
their efforts, with the result that in December, 1863, the Twentieth
Regiment of U.S. coloured troops was enlisted, and within a few months,
two more regiments, known as the Twenty-sixth and the Thirty-first.

In those days the club-house faced Union Square, at the junction of
Seventeenth Street and Broadway. Early in 1868 the Union League moved to
a house at the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, the
building afterwards to be occupied in turn by the University Club and
the Manhattan Club. The structure had been erected by Mr. Jerome for th